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Yar, Busy Busy Busy

Haven’t had time to sit down and do any writing lately, between work, exercise, visiting relatives, and some side projects.

Exercise-wise (man, that’s a nice domain. nuts, its already taken.) I’ve been trying out some new stuff. Turns out I messed myself up a bit in the final stretch at the ARC Run half marathon. I think it was either the last 90 degree left or 50 foot pea gravel pit that did me in. Not sure exactly what I did. But had some pain shooting up and down my leg for a few days. I couldn’t localize it down to foot, ankle, calf, or knee specifically. It seemed to hurt in different places at different times.

So, I thought it was time for a good a little time off from running. So I started swapping some runs at the Y for weights, some outdoor runs with skates, and just plain vegging out a bit.

The weights are a nice change of pace after all the miles. Feels good work work some different (forgetten?) muscle groups. After the first 2 works I was in agony with soreness and pretty much unable to lift my arms above my shoulders. Thankfully, that faded soon enough, and I haven’t been nearly as sore in sessions since then. The calf machine also helped stretch out my problem leg. I think I’m gonna try to stick with the weights circuit (Monday’s and Friday’s seem to be working well) and see if I can tighten up some problem areas; namely my gut and man boobs.

Skating was also a welcome change. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember/realize that my skates do a pretty good job chewing up my ankles. My k2 skates are a few years old, but the inner boots seem to be in pretty good shape. I checked for excessive wear in the boot areas where they cause me problems (on my left ankle, really bad on the inside) and they still seem pretty cushy there. Blisters in that area kinda suck as almost all my other shoes tend to irritate the same area afterward. I should try two pairs of socks (maybe a high pair and a crew) next time and see if the extra padding fixes the problem.

With alternative exercise and light miles on the track at the Y, I think I’m about 95% back to normal. Did my a first 10 miler outside in a few weeks yesterday, and felt pretty good through out. Was a little a little sore in that leg afterward, but I think it was more due to not having gone that far in a while, than anything related to the injury. This run also put me past 1000 miles for the year!

Side project-wise, I’ve been working on my own RSS reader. I’ve been using Feed On Feeds for a while now. Its quite usable its beginning to get a little clunky as the number of feeds I track has grown. I thought about trying to hack the additional functionality I wanted into FoF, but its php based. I know enough php to probably do what I want, but its kinda painful to shoehorn stuff into other folk’s code.

So, I’ve embarked on writing my own reader from scratch. If you couldn’t have guessed already, I’m using a perl cgi backend. Whipping up some code to fetch/parse/store RSS information was pretty straightforward.

I’m currently working on the interface. Of course, I’m shooting for something Web 2.0-esque that’s Ajax-ified. I’m enjoying learning some tricks along the way. The DOM manipulation development process is proving to kinda interesting compared to the pure CGI world I’m so used to.

I’ve got about 24 hours in so far and I’m pretty pleased. I’m also to the point where I might consider letting some friends give it a shot. If you’re interested let me know. Outside of that I’m gonna start a wish list for features then start bagging ’em out a few at a time.

Ok, enough rambling for now. Flirting with the idea of going for a quick run, if I can just put off some chores, may I just might head out…